WiB’s Entrepreneurship Panel
This past Monday, the Vanderbilt WiB community had the amazing opportunity to speak with female entrepreneurs and learn from their experience and invaluable advice. These women all took huge risks to start their own businesses but ultimately achieved great rewards in doing so. Throughout this exciting event, these women spoke about their path to entrepreneurship, the setbacks they faced, and how students in college can already begin considering a career like theirs. Here, we take a closer look at the specific experiences of each woman who spoke during our event.
The first speaker we had was Jennifer Worthington of Immersive Activations Group. She spoke about how her experience working at a stable and developed company allowed her to understand how companies are run and gave her the tools she needed to start her own. She candidly discussed the life of an entrepreneur as building something from scratch with no safety net to help you out when you fail. As scary as it can be to fail, she reassured us that the successes she has also been able to experience as an entrepreneur make taking the risks worth it.
Next, we spoke with the sisters who started Greenery Co. here in Nashville, Caroline Gaston and Whitney Abblitt. Despite not having started their careers in the restaurant industry and having little experience within the industry, they opened a (so far, very successful) restaurant together. They discussed the importance of having a strong business background to understand how to make something profitable. Most importantly, they emphasized that an entrepreneur needs an interest in learning and curiosity that drives them through their process.
The final woman we spoke with is Christine Owenell of Owenell Global Consultancy. Her most unique piece of advice was to humanize the entrepreneurship process. As she candidly put it, no one knows everything. Even those who seem to have all of the answers will still face setbacks and need guidance. Because of this, successful entrepreneurs, in her opinion, are those that can be comfortable with uncertainty and with not knowing. This attitude is important, as you face many risks and setbacks in the process.
By the end of this event, these four women left the audience with an all-encompassing message: with the right motivations, willingness to learn, and appetite for risk, anyone can be an entrepreneur. The stories these women told of their own experiences and the advice and encouragement they gave will stick with everyone who attended this panel throughout their career journeys.